“I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, and no heart.” – Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report

In 2006, Stephen Colbert promised (parodically) to “not tell the news to you, but feel the news, at you.” He coined the term truthiness, a quality applied to something that has a sense of truth, that is true enough to serve its purpose, without actually being factually accurate. It was just a swipe at lazy newscasting, but Colbert had it right – in modern culture the truths we tell ourselves are the ones that best make us feel something. Advertising has long known that, and has told actual truths about its products, wrapped in representational ‘life truths’ that spin off of it. These are narratives, and all parties in the situation know it. So far, so good.

In my second BBH interview in 2010, Planning Director Ed Booty asked me, “do you think people have had enough of the real?” The concensus we got to was that people could never have enough of the real, but that media forces have worked to inflate people’s expectations of what the real can deliver. Remember: this was at time when Endemol’s solution to the stagnation of ‘reality show’ Big Brother was to put ever more abrasive and conflicting characters into the mix, and people had begun to call it out as a circus. Since then, the response from entertainment has been a whole string of programmes with a new definition of truth: The Hills, Jersey Shore, Geordie Shore, The Only Way Is Essex. Watching them is like reading The National Enquirer; within their own ecosystem they are true, and they offer the most value when you read them as true. Deep down, you know them to be false, but the spectacle tacitly asks you to suspend that to get some value from them. They are truthy. The old masters of this form, the wrestling (“sports entertainment”) industry have a term for this – kayfabe. Successfully engaging with kayfabe can be a lot of fun.

Note: Not an actual undertaker

Even when the cause is ‘just’, the scent of manipulation is hard to deoderise. In the past month, we’ve seen KONY 2012 explode and be exploded – partly from speculation about the company’s finances, partly from questions about the appropriateness of the solutions they offered to the problem, but in equal part from the sheer slickness of the manipulation. It was too glossy for the message it was trying to put across, too much like an episode of MTV’s Made, rather than a call to action. The response to this criticism might be “that’s the format our target audience responds to, so that’s what we have to use,” but the savagery of the counterattack suggests that young people still respond to message as much as medium.

Then there’s Apple. When public radio show This American Life chose to broadcast an excerpt of monologist Mike Daisey’s show The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs in January, they got their highest-ever ratings in the show’s 17-year history. That’s because Mike’s monologue is the story of his experiences in Chinese tech factories, including Foxconn, one of Apple’s biggest suppliers. Because it describes the working practices that go into making the tech we use even as we consume blogs like this one. The narrative arc and the expertly crafted pathos could only come from a practiced storyteller – and therein came the problem, because Daisey used  a storyteller’s toolbox – deletion, distortion and assumption – to the point where the story just wasn’t true any more. It was a cobbling together of things that happened to Daisey, things that used to happen but don’t any more, things he’d heard about from others but had no proof of, and simple fabrication. And Daisey has been eviscerated by much of his audience. This American Life has never felt so mortally wounded – to the point where Ira Glass and his team produced an entire episode called simply Retraction, and pulled the original from the podcast feeds.

Where does that leave the practice of marketing? Advertising deals in truthiness because it uses things that didn’t happen to get audiences to think of what could happen, and to feel the ‘truth’ of a brand’s world. And this was Mike Daisey’s defence on This American Life: “this isn’t about me lying to you or anyone else. This is about me doing everything I could to get the media to pay attention… Did I go too far in that effort? Maybe. That’s for others to judge.” The truth didn’t quite cut it, so he used made up facts in order to get to what he thought was a higher truth – the story of labour practice in other countries. And to be fair, it worked well enough to enchant the audiences on his tour, the normally journalistically rigorous This American Life, and everyone that listened to it – including the New York Times.

But what these events teach us is the care we must use when we wield the power of story. That when you have an audience that wants life to be larger than life, they should know where and when the enlargements and the brightening of the colours is occurring. There have been calls for cosmetic adverts to have an “airbrushing watermark”. We don’t need to go that far for story: rather, we just have to watch where we’re putting the truthiness. We have to map the zones in the media space where absolute truth is expected – yes, spaces like facebook and twitter – and treat people with what they deserve there.

But the biggest lesson of all lies further upstream. As marketers for brands, we’re usually telling stories about ourselves. So if we want to tell any story we can – all we have to do is make those facts be true by causing them to happen. If you’re Starbucks, don’t just talk about how friendly you are – get your employees to write customers’ names on their takeaway lattes. If you’re Johnnie Walker, don’t just talk about progress – put a real investment into the Keep Walking Project, and make progress happen.

The people have spoken, and they’re not satisfied with truthiness. They don’t just want brands to tell them stories. They want brands to take part in the rewriting of reality, so that the stories they tell each other can be that much more amazing.

Hoxton Street Monster Supply Store interior (photo: www.monstersupplies.org)

At Labs we like nothing more that creativity put to good use (reference our love for ichainsaws, gloves, design-led activism and fightwear with a social mission). Chuck in some Mortal Terror and we’re yours.

With the recent launch of their online shop, www.monstersupplies.org, our friends at Hoxton Street Monster Supplies have extended what is essentially an imaginative, immaculately designed fund-raising platform. It’s all in aid of Ministry of Stories, a creative writing non-profit which is supported by all proceeds from the shop.

If you need to stock up on Zombie Fresh Mints or my personal favourite, a tin of “A Vague Sense of Unease”, Hoxton Street Monster Supplies is the site for you.

A Vague Sense Of Unease, available at http://www.ministryofstories.org/

And, hey, the holidays are upon us, so satisfy the buying-spree beast within with a little monster-based goodness – just make sure you get your order in by this Friday 1pm (GMT), if you want to make last orders before Christmas.

Behind the shop at 159 Hoxton Street, through a hidden door, the Ministry of Stories exists to help young people in East London learn how to be storytellers. Which, as @jeremyet always likes to say, is where the magic happens.

Ministry of Stories Writer (photo: http://www.ministryofstories.org/)

You can shop online here or volunteer to help at the Ministry of Stories here.

Credits:

The website was created “by a small group of unpaid humans in their spare time”: design by Gavin and Jason Fox, build by Simon Pearson, project management by Chris Meachin, user experience by Mike Towber; and art direction by We Made This.

monstersupplies.org

Certain artists are typecast, sometimes by choice. They capture a style so well that it comes to define them. Author Jonathan Safran Foer falls outside of that camp with a chameleonic thud. He keeps us curious.

In his new book, Tree of Codes, Foer does with a physical book what we often neglect in digital—he turns reading into an experience. In showing how a story’s environment affects its meaning, he gives digital storytellers a slap in the face.

Tree of Codes, breaks from the standard book format in two ways:

1. It creates a new story by tearing apart and piecing together an old one—Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles.
2. Each page is die-cut to reveal just a handful of words and phrases.

I found the book annoying to read at first, despite its delicate beauty. I couldn’t decipher between the page I was reading and the ones beneath it. It was like a depth perception test following a mug of bourbon.

After sobering up and finding a better technique, I enjoyed the layout. Words hovered in a dream-ridden state. Thought went into each line, each phrase and how it was laid out. Such attention to the UX of reading is tough to find on the web. Foer’s analog approach would be easy enough to toy with in digital. So why aren’t we more playful with narratives online?

Brilliant writing isn’t enough to keep readers happy. Long blocks of copy, no matter how poetic, are begging for attention spans to scamper off elsewhere. In a design dominant field, it’s easy to neglect voice, tone, even punctuation. Or to forget about how each will figure into a broader environment.

Maybe that’s because we get swept up in technology. We use it to tell stories rather than to shape them. The following ideas and executions use technology to influence how stories are read. Bravo! The better ones put UX at the forefront. In doing so, they offer some lessons in communicating creatively.

• We Tell Stories: Bring physical location into the narrative.
• Telescopic Text: Let the reader decide what information to absorb.
• TextArc: Represent text visually.
• The Sweet Old Etcetera: Make static literature kinetic. There are lots more eLiterature examples here.
• Open Bookmarks: Consider the selfish benefits to social reading.
• Ben the Bodyguard: Communicate utility via a character.
• @RuthBourdain: Mix vinegar and oil. Hilarity ensues. (Perhaps a bit off the mark, but a good demo of re-imagining existing voices.)

These concepts and methods fool with language, narrative and technology to entertain. It’s humbling to think that a few pieces of paper and an X-Acto knife can do the same.

When we leave room for interpretation and delight, we can expand the playground for digital fiction. We can turn stories into experiences that are unique to each reader. So let’s stop neglecting the goddamn words. Pretty please?

Audiences no longer think in silos – the recent 2Screen evening demonstrated the power of creating compelling behaviour drivers and experiences across multiple platforms. Power to the Pixel’s recent centrepiece event, the Cross-Media Forum in London, brought together leading thinkers and pioneers from across the media industries who are instrumental in changing the way stories are conceived and are reaching audiences.

Below, PttP’s CEO Liz Rosenthal and COO Tishna Molla picks out some themes that are emerging from their work and, for anyone interested in new tools for storytellers, links to deeper thinking from the Pixel Report.

Story experience

“The best storytelling devices are, and have always been, rooted in human behaviours and desires,” says Mike Monello, Founder of Campfire and Co-Creator of The Blair Witch Project. His keys to creating a successful story experience are;

• Communal experience
• Making it tangible
• Fostering discovery
• Making it personal
• Building a world larger than your characters

Story = brand

Whilst marketers have long been used to advertising products across multiple platforms, do they really understand how to keep audiences engaged? How do you begin to find your audience, let alone engage them? How do you decide which platforms to use to tell your story, let alone work out how to use them? Director Jon M Chu, is an expert in how to not only reach, but to sustain an audience. He conceived The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers (The LXD) – “a living, breathing comic book” – first and foremost as a brand, enabling connections with different audiences across multiple platforms.

Power lies with the audience

With the impact of new technologies has come a shift in authorship and access. Audiences have moved from passive viewer to active collaborator, stakeholder, co-creator, marketer, distributor, even financier. There’s a new breed of storyteller emerging, one that understands the new technologies, tools and services that are changing the way that stories are told, how and where audiences can interact with them and, as a result, the whole business of storytelling.

Lance Weiler (@lanceweiler), US filmmaker and story architect, grew his audience for Head Trauma - a fusion of feature film, live performance, mobile interaction, online gaming and remix – by allowing the audience to discover and expand elements of the story, moving them from one platform to the next in the process. Audience numbers grew in direct correlation to the number of access points made available to them.

Finnish director, Timo Vuorensola is an expert at collaborating and engaging with his audience throughout the development, production and distribution of his films. Crowd Controls is one great example of a tool that he uses to harness the power of the audience.

With technology advancing so rapidly, the possibilities for storytelling and audience interaction seem limitless or intimidating, depending on your point of view. No-one has all the answers anymore (if they ever did) which makes it essential now, more than ever, to share information and foster new networks, collaborations and partnerships. Which is what we do @powertothepixel.

Over the last few years I dedicated my ‘extra’ time to understanding and cultivating the theory, articles and case studies surrounding propagation planning. I shared everything I learned on my Blog. By sharing, others contributed and the ideas got better.

Sharing and generosity are very important in the advertising industry today. They make all of us better. As they say, “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

Edward Boches, who is in the process of formalizing propagation planning at Mullen, wrote a great post this week asking a provocative question, “Do you give content away because you want credit?” For me, I give content away to become a member of the club. A club of strategic planning minds that contribute everyday to a greater collective. This club is made up of so many people that I couldn’t possibly name them all here… but you know who you are.

So I was thrilled when Mark Lewis and the Planning-Ness conference asked if Mike Monello (Co-Founder at Campfire) and I would share our thoughts on propagation planning. I hope that you can take something away from this deck and inspire your creative and social media teams to develop work that gets spread.

(Best viewed by clicking MENU and FULL SCREEN)

Late in the spring, British Airways gave us a great brief for North America. Last year they held a contest where they gave out hundreds of free international flights (and shipping) to small business owners in the U.S. so that they could do business face-to-face rather than just via email, iChat, Skype and…fax. They hold the belief that face-to-face contact helps seal more deals rather than just staying put and hoping for the best—which in the current economy, we’re probably more likely to do. Stay the course. Take less risks. Tread water. Shutter the place. Etc.

We immediately told them we would use the entire budget to make a feature length-documentary about the death of the use of the fax machine in Sacramento-area small businesses between ’98-’08, while also weaving in our commentary on the dearth of new ideas in leather belt holsters for mobile devices.

They pushed back. Gently.

Actually, that last paragraph’s not true. BA were giving away more free flights this year, and thought last year’s winners—in telling their own unique success stories—would inspire other small business owners here to enter this year’s contest, and go see their clients and prospective clients face-to-face.

Meeting real people who’ve dreamt up their own business and are ambitious enough to make it a reality was the fun part. Working with a budget that didn’t allow us to send clients, directors, producers, account people and creatives back to far-flung locations to recreate face-to-face meetings was the challenge.

Tireless creatives Jessica Shriftman and Zac Sax teamed with director Chris Bren and Picture Farm out of Brooklyn, as well as photographer Todd Selby, and BBH editors Mark Block and Jonah Oskow to bring stories from a handful of the most compelling businesses to life. Throughout the summer, the group was fueled for the most part by Kombucha tea and it’s startling before-taste.

The films (and the chance to win) can be found at British Airways’ Face of Opportunity site, and, we hope, elsewhere.

“The best camera is the one you have with you.” (Chase Jarvis, see: http://j.mp/ad29YM)

Powerful technologies and tools for creativity and filmmaking used to be exclusively in the hands of professionals. The cost of entry was high and the learning curve steep. With the recent launch of Apple’s 4th generation iPhone, consumers can now carry in their pockets a device fully capable of capturing, editing and publishing HD videos. This is an exciting prospect – no more grainy, pixelated, thumbnail-sized videos of our funniest or most beloved moments or the latest breaking news story.

Imagine what Gordon Gekko could achieve with this.

Only a few short days after iPhone 4 hit the marketplace, an exceptionally impressive example of the film-making potential of the device surfaced. This film, “Apple of My Eye” directed by Michael Koerbel, was shot and edited entirely on an iPhone 4 in under 48 hours.

“Apple of My Eye” – an iPhone 4 film – UPDATE: Behind the scenes footage included from Michael Koerbel on Vimeo.

The gap between professional and consumer production quality is narrowing and we’re excited to see what people will create with these new tools. Even just a week after the new iPhone4 launched we’d started to notice a new strand of film-making emerging using the new technology. Following a quick Twitter exchange between Craig Elimeliah at Freedom & Partners, Ben Malbon and myself, F&P were able to quickly design and develop a platform to showcase our appreciation for the power and creativity that the iPhone4 offers in the area of movie-making.

We’re calling it The iOScars.

In the spirit of leading by example, here’s one I shot during a weekend trip.

So do you have an iPhone 4 and a story to tell? Let’s see what you can do.

http://www.theiOScars.com

@TheiOScars

CREDITS

Craig Elimeliah (@craigelimeliah)

Seth Weisfeld (@seth_weisfeld)

Ben Malbon (@malbonnington)

Rina Miele (@honeydesign)

Brian Kadar (@briankadar)

http://www.iamironman2.com/home/

In the last of our blog posts with Dan Light we’ve saved the trickiest questions for last. What, if any, are the roles for brands in these transmedia extensions of the narrative? Can it ever get deeper than product placement and, if so, can brands ever make a legitimate contribution to the storytelling experience?

In the past decade we’ve seen that the music industry had to get screwed before it would change, the newspaper industry is struggling and the film industry is being forced to reinvent itself. Can entertainment industries transform themselves? Where do you see the film industry going?

I think the film industry is going to polarise. I think you’re going to have your Avatars – they will be big 3D events that will be 15-year projects and will command bigger and bigger sums of money.

At the other end will be the classic independent films, built around a good story but also written from the ground up, with a view to all the ways in which that story can be told, developed and audiences be found.

So brands need to find new ways to engage audiences and clearly sponsorship of this kind of content is a legitimate path, albeit it represents a fairly transactional relationship with the producer. Is this how you see the role of brands developing?

I always thought CASTAWAY was a reasonably good example, with the FedEx brand being woven into the very fabric of the film.  I’m sure some people hate it, but I’d rather that than a film where there are ten different consumer electronic products brandished in clear view at some point in proceedings.

Tom Hanks, Castaway

So your view is proper integration into the story, as opposed to product placement?

I think it’s about getting a brand involved early enough to figure out a way to work it in there which isn’t contrived.  Like [Mother Vision's] SOMERSTOWN and Eurostar, where the brand provides a discreet, credible backdrop to the film.  I registered the branding whilst I was watching it, but I only found that afterwards that they’d been involved in helping fund the film, which communicated something positive to me about their brand.  If there are independent films being made that are as good as SOMERS TOWN and it’s happening because a brand like Eurostar can find a way in and is prepared to get involved, then that’s great.

Versus say, Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ video, which seems completed prostituted with product placement. There is a point where she has Diet Coke cans in her hair, then she pulls out a branded phone on virgin mobile… I could go on and on…

But from what I understand about that video, it’s almost post-modern, and self-referential.  It’s saying ‘I’m prostituting myself by doing this, and I’m going to make as much money as possible by doing it. I don’t have a problem with that, and I don’t care if you do.’

The past few years we’ve seen a lot of brands putting themselves in social environments online and hoping consumers will share and talk about their product or service, without creating anything truly participative to fuel the conversation. How do you tackle this when you create and distribute film content online?

A great example of this is the IRON MAN 2 interactive trailer.  That was embedded on a lot of major film blogs when it broke, then picked up by a lot of the second tier blogs.  It ended up with thousands of embeds and three quarters of a million impressions in less than a week.

Hold that up against the paid media equivalent, a standard MPU, which is only on the page because someone’s been paid to put it there.  The interactive trailer is there because someone has chosen to put there.   You’re not having to pay for any of the impressions it generates, once you have created something cool.

Yes, though we find the fact there’s a cost involved in seeding the content is often left out of the equation.

There is if you want to break big like that and it’s easier when you’re talking IRON MAN, where there’s so much existing interest.  But also, I think the timing there was spot on.  People had seen the trailer, and this was exactly the time to reveal a bit more of the film, ahead of the impending media blitz.

Do you think that it was down to the huge draw of the content, or because it was so shareable?
Both really.  The wrapper that was used for that had been developed over a number of years, with Facebook and Twitter functionality displayed at the top level.  They represent a huge proportion of the market when it comes to shareable content.  There are probably thirty other social networks integrated into that wrapper, but none of them are at anything like the same level as Twitter or Facebook.  But you need to create content that people will feel a proactive urge to share.  That’s not especially difficult with something like IRON MAN, but it might be much tougher with a less glamorous brand or property.

This was the last installment of our interview with the wonderful Dan Light; look out in the coming months for big news regarding his next projects. Dan is @danlight on Twitter, and scribes a rather excellent blog over at daniellight.co.uk.